Senior CPU HW Performance Architect

Senior CPU HW Performance Architect
Location: Cambridge, UK
Type: Permanent
Experience: 6+ years
About the Role
Our client is a leading global technology organisation with a major R&D presence in Cambridge. They are looking for a Senior CPU HW Performance Architect to join their CPU Performance team and contribute to the development of next-generation high-performance CPU cores.
You will work across performance modelling, workload analysis and microarchitectural exploration, helping guide critical design decisions across performance, power and area.
Key Responsibilities

• Define next-generation CPU microarchitecture and high-level specifications in collaboration with hardware and software teams.
• Build and refine cycle-accurate and functional simulators to evaluate new microarchitectural concepts.
• Propose innovative CPU microarchitecture features and analyse their impact on performance, power and area.
• Profile workloads, identify bottlenecks and perform sensitivity analysis to guide CPU optimisation.
• Work closely with architecture, hardware, software and performance engineering teams.

Requirements

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering or a related discipline, with significant relevant industry experience, or a PhD.
• Strong understanding of CPU microarchitecture, particularly areas such as fetch/decode, branch prediction, rename/dispatch, out-of-order execution, execution units, load/store, prefetching and memory hierarchy.
• Good understanding of performance, power and area trade-offs in high-performance CPU design.
• Strong software engineering and performance profiling skills.
• Programming experience with modern C++ and Python.
• Strong analytical and debugging ability.

Desirable

• Deep expertise in CPU architecture and microarchitecture.
• Experience taking microarchitectural innovations from concept towards silicon.
• Hands-on experience with cycle-accurate simulators and performance models.
• Pre-silicon performance analysis experience.
• Understanding of operating systems, compilers and application workloads.
• Patents, publications or other recognised technical contributions.